Devoir

1

1

“Here! Here’s blood.”

“Blood? Then his spacesuit is leaky.”

Herschwin chuckled. “Wasn’t my shot that bad after all, was it?”

Reggie Trullo looked around with a wide face. In his mind, he checked off his list: uncharted territory; too many places to hide and too few men to help search. “Damned. We need to find him before… He knows too much.”

“All we have to do is follow this trail. His blood shows us the way. Simple enough.”

“No disrespect to your shooting Herschwin, but this seems a little too simple. I don’t trust it. I don’t trust him.”

“But you can see for yourself that there’s blood here, right?”

“Uhhuh. And I also see the light of billions of stars that are long dead.” Reggie tapped his right hand against his helmet. Within a second, all kinds of pop-up screens appeared in his effort-battered visor. “The Feds will be here in one minute.”

“There’s four of us Reg. Let’s split up; continue in two’s,” Herschwin suggested.

A nervous smile squirmed over Reggie’s sweaty head. He got too old for this kind of manhunt. His chest went madly up and down; at this rate, he knew, he’d get through his oxygen way too fast. “You’ve f****d it all again, Hersch.”

“Let me fix it, Reg. We can’t come back empty-handed.”

“No, you’re right about that. Giorgio will be happy to help all four of us ripping our helmets off our suits,” he sighed. “With our heads still in…”

Herschwin choked on the idea of what the ruthless Giorgio Faenza would do to them. “So? Split up and keep looking?” he asked worriedly.

“Where does that blood trail start?” Reggie asked.

“Right here,” Herschwin said. He placed the boot of his spacesuit close to the blood spatter on the lunar surface to indicate the exact spot.

“Okay, Hersch. I’ll let you take care of it here. With the Feds.”

“With the Feds?” Herschwin asked surprised.

Reggie shook his head. “He just knows too much.” Before Herschwin realized what was happening, Reggie had pulled out his laser g*n and shot a smooth round hole in Herschwin’s boot. The second shot, in the middle of Herschwin’s helmet and neatly between his eyes, shattered his head. “And you don’t know half…”

Herschwin’s blood seeped out of his spacesuit and slowly flowed across the surface of the inhospitable moon. The smallest of the two moons of the poison-green planet Viridis. Gravity was barely enough to attract some of the blood; the rest continued to float in drops just above the surface. “Sorry Hersch. But this will keep the Feds busy for a while.” He looked at the two men standing next to him. “Problems?”

“He suggested he’d solve it himself,” one of them hummed.

“Yes, I heard him say it myself,” the other man said, scared because he knew the same thing could happen to him.

“Good,” Reggie grinned. “Let’s deal with that traitor before he does any more damage.”

* * *

“Is that him?”

Special Space Agent Leeanne Monterrey whistled between her teeth. “I’m afraid even his own mother can no longer recognize this heap of misery, sir. Completely destroyed.”

Commander Xiaobo sighed. “Then you take…”

Monterrey held up her console. “… A DNA sample. Already done; five it a few seconds sir, the data is now being checked.”

Xiaobo raised one eyebrow. “Well done Monterrey.”

Monterrey looked at the victim and the traces of blood around him. “It’s like there’s more than one wounded person. Do you see Xiaobo? That blood trail doesn’t look like it came from this guy. Yet I only see one victim.” Less than three seconds later, the results appeared on Monterrey’s console. “Zachary Herschwin,” she read aloud. “Associated with Giorgio Faenza. Hmm… Isn’t that one from the Mafia?”

“Yep,” Xiaobo said as he looked at Herschwin’s remains. “Don Faenza. Head of the Viridis chapter. That whole f*****g planet is pretty much ruled by the Mafia.”

“What about the man we’re looking for? Mafia too?”

“No. He’s…” Again, Xiaobo sighed. “He was one of us…”

* * *

Don Faenza ran grumbling through his study on Viridis. “How much longer?”

His assistant hardly dared to say anything.

“I asked how long!”

“Um… Another hour.”

“f**k! One hour before his post goes viral. And what have the picciotti- our boys - achieved? Nothing. Nothing at all.” Don Giorgio Faenza kicked down the chair behind his antique walnut desk. “The filthy traitor! Do we know anything about his family yet? Wife? Children?”

“We can’t find anything on him.”

“Nothing at all? How can I use a nothing? Look on the f*****g birth register. Find out who his mother is. Dig up his grandmother. Or his dog. Go find something!”

“Sorry Don. The only thing we could find…”

“Yes?” Giorgio Faenza said. His voice suddenly punctuated with hope and eagerness.

“… is the announcement…”

“f**k!” He didn’t bother to pick up his chair; sat on the edge of his empty desk. “Paolo.”

“Yes Don?” his assistant Paolo Mazzanti said.

“That chair…”

“I’ll pick it up right now Don,” Paolo said, rushing to the chair.

Don Faenza held his hand up as a sign that Paolo had to wait. “That chair has fallen. But it’s not broken. It’s still functioning. And when we put it up, everything is back to normal.”

“Don?” Paolo had long been Giorgio Faenza’s advisor; half a word was often enough, but at this moment Paolo could not get his boss.

“If that renegade rat goes viral, I, my family, everything and everyone around us, will be taken down. Trampled but not killed. His message doesn’t mean the end Paolo. He can’t kill us.” He chuckled. “Our friend himself, on the other hand, can expect a slow and painful death…”